J.C. and the Boys - Chapters 16-18

Chapter 16

                 

                  If Joe Wood had been forty years younger, he would have made a pass at Jeannie Christopher. He still might, if he ever felt well enough again. Joe enjoyed her company; he was glad when she was assigned to care for him. He liked the banter that passed between them.

                  She was, he had decided, one of the best people he had ever run into in a long career as a traveling salesman, a career in which he met more people in a year than most people met in a lifetime. It was a question of attitude, he decided. Some of the nurses seemed cold. They might have thought of him as no more than a piece of meat, to be washed daily, turned to avoid bedsores, poked with needles, tested, rested and nested safe in his bed. There was a night shift battle-ax whose sole purpose in life was making his miserable. But Jeannie—J.C. as the others called her—always seemed to have time to stop for a minute and talk, tease him and be teased in return. Hell, someone like her would be worth staying alive for, if he would just stop having these dizzy spells, and the visions that came along with them.

                  There was no other word he could think of to describe the experiences. The episode he had had when Jones died in the next room still scared him. They told him, the docs and nurses, that it was because the arteries in his neck got plugged up that he had these visions. Maybe so, but that was just as scary as if they were real—maybe scarier.

                  The people he saw, talked to, took comfort from, seemed as real to Joe, maybe moreso, than the people he remembered in his life. He was a loner, always had been. Parents died young, brothers and sisters scattered in their teens. Hell, he had led the exodus from that small town in wherever the hell it was. Midwest, somewhere. Missouri? Didn’t much matter. Thought he was in Texas, now. Couldn’t be sure, might be Oklahoma, California. Somewhere warm, except for the cold air coming from the ceiling. Drenched in sweat, feeling a little dizzy. A wrench from down below, somewhere in the gut. Dizzy was nothing new. Always called him dizzy as a kid; started when he pitched in Little League.

                  He was slipping out again, knew he was whenever he wondered where he’d come from. Breeze was sure cold. Maybe he was in Minnesota, land of ten thousand—twenty thousand?—lakes. Might explain why he was wet. Through and through. Shit. Oh, well, no pants on anyway, so what difference? Wonder where that little nurse is? Cuter than anything, but tiny. Don’t wanta squash her.

                  Something slipped again. Joe felt the lurch. Earthquake? Not in Minnesota.

                  Joe felt Marie’s absence. Good to know she was going back. Missed her though, here in the fog. She played good music. He hummed a few bars from the memory of another vision, then it too slipped away. Marie was a good one, glad to see her go back. Didn’t feel right for her to be slipping off like that. Not time for her yet.

                  Him?

                  Jones was nowhere around. Another man done gone. Couldn’t feel him anywhere. Gone to his reward, followed Mrs. Perez, who could speak English in the fog, but not in the bog. Interesting, if weird.

                  Lonely, here, this time.

                  “Don’t look down.”

                  A warning?

                  He looked down. Mistake.

                  He hung precariously above his bed, dipping and turning in the currents of—not air, no it sure wasn’t air. Something, though. He saw himself, shell man, down below, and it was staring at him, eyes open wider than they should be, mouth stretched in a mortal scream, soundless to him now, but loud, he knew, in the room, in the hospital, a scream that ripped through defenses like a knife through the soft belly of an enemy. He felt them running, little J.C. first, the others behind her, before they entered his room.

                  He poised on the edge of the abyss. He should be more scared. But he knew what was happening to him. He had been on the journey, and he really did know better than to look down. But he couldn’t help himself. Mom had always chewed his ass about not obeying her.

                  Who the hell said that, anyway? Joe tried to look around, but his gaze was locked on himself, still screaming in the bed, looking into the pit and not liking it a bit.

                  Rhymes, yet. Must be another attack.

                  A filmy silver cord stretched from self to self. J.C. and the others went right through it. Never noticed him hanging there under the ceiling.

                  There were dead bugs in the light fixture. Irrelevant detail, but there they were.

                  The cord was thin, diaphanous (a word he knew he had never ever used before), sparkling like a Roman candle he had held in his hands at six, waving it through the humid July air so that it made sparkling lines of burning metal. He passed his hand through the sparks, but they did not burn. Insubstantial, almost spiritual, but so bright they hurt his eyes in the moist hot night time. Somehow, he had known not to touch the source.

                  The cord was like that, weaving between the two Joes, sparking and silent.

                  Metaphor seemed more important. Everything was like something, but not quite.

                  No metaphor for that. There was nothing like. It was all new. Not uncomfortable, but so different that he could not talk to himself about how it was.

                  The place was sealed: no way out. He went in search of an exit, leaving them below, stretching the silver cord. Time to go. Nothing here but the usual. An adventure in the making. Joe Wood, the Marlon Perkins of hallucination, the Jacques Cousteau of TIA’s, the Neil Armstrong of the deranged brain.

                  If he was deranged, he would by God enjoy it. To hell with the pit.

                  He slipped on his old baseball cap and took off through the wall (St. Paul hadn’t said anything about spiritual baseball caps, had he?). It was a Rangers cap, a pretty spiritual team, when you stopped to think about it; they played year after year with only the rarest hope of winning.

                  The thought passed. So did Joe.

                  Walls, it turned out, were complicated things in a hospital. There was more plumbing than he knew. Oxygen tubes, painted green, snaked between the sheets of gypsum, boring through studs, snaking up from somewhere down below.

                  He played in the interstices, following water, gas, electrical lines, the cables that channeled data from patient to monitor. Each felt different. He stayed with each as long as it was interesting. He surfed the sixty cycle wave of alternating current down to the breakers in the basement and to the crest of the transformers, where he was changed to a pulse of hot water, burbling through the copper pipes. Someone opened a pressure valve, and Joe was released as steam in a room off the surgery suite. He expanded, no choice but to obey Boyle’s law, until he condensed as a lens of water. Someone wiped him away and wrung him out over a drain. He fell with others who were not of his own kind down the drain, mixed with them, felt an awful suction, pulling down hard.

                  He resisted and broke free. He was still in the pipe, but the water flowed around and through him. He was in darkness, able to sense things around him—dark shapes, someplace between here and there, undefined chunks of insubstantial matter that he knew he could penetrate if he could just remember how.

                  I am very confused, he thought.

                  Good, Something answered. I told you not to look down.

                  It’s not like the other times, Joe complained.

                  Trust me, Something said. You don’t have much choice, anyway.

                  I noticed that, Joe told It. This time there was no reply. He forced himself to keep his eyes (eyes, huh?) focused upward.

                  The empty shapes seemed to close in. Joe felt squeezed, then shot upward, away from the sewer, spilling up through the drain or the sink in the room next to his. He recognized it from when he had been admitted to the hospital in the first place. It was what they called the “crash room,” a little bigger than the other rooms in ICU, with a little more equipment, a little more space for the staff to work around the bed.

                  He was not alone. There were three other people in the room with him, two in their bodies and one like him but unlike him, too. It seemed to shuttle back and forth between the other two, two women, one young, one old. When it shifted between them he could see it.

                  Something had sent Joe here.

                  The thing that shifted between the old woman and the young was ugly and mean. It recognized Joe’s presence. It did not like him a whole lot.

                  Joe tried to escape, but the walls, ceiling and floor became impermeable and held him prisoner with the thing. It reached a tendril at him, not of matter but of energy, soul-stuff. Joe shrank away. The thing seemed content with that. The tendril returned to the thing, which spread itself over the body on the bed. Only a small lump protruded above the natural shape of the old woman, an excrescence that reminded Joe of the old CBS eye.

                  It watched him watching it.

                  The younger woman massaged the thing as it clung to the body of the older. She hated what she was doing. She averted her face, choking down terror and nausea, but her hands were busy, spreading some greasy yellow substance on the old woman’s skin. She watched the door, listening for approaching footsteps. But there would be none, Joe knew, because he was distracting everyone on the unit with his out of body experience, his code. He wondered how his body was doing. What he was being forced to witness repulsed him. What he was being forced to watch he knew he would have to stop.

                  What had happened to the land of milk and honey in the sweet bye and bye? This was nothing like what he had been led to believe in. It wasn’t supposed to be hard to go to heaven—to hell, for that matter, he guessed. What about eternal rest?

                  The eye frightened him. If it could speak, would it say You’re next?

                  The thing seemed to preen like a cat under the younger woman’s hands. It sucked vitality, fed on life, on the intricate bemusing chemistry of the being it enfolded, the flux of sodium and potassium in the nervous system, the mechanical pump of heart and artery, the electrical dance of impulse in the brain—anything from which it could drain power.

                  The tic on the old woman’s face was growing stronger as the beast reveled in the slow devouring of its prey. The younger woman saw the change and tried uselessly to pull her hands away, to escape her unwilling collaboration with the evil thing.

                  Joe felt a sudden rush of understanding, a gush of knowledge into him from the Something that had spoken to him in the drain.

                  The thing did not want to kill its victim. It was like a cancer, feeding on her, unwilling to finish her off, a parasite that would make her live as long as possible, giving itself a perverse sort of shadow existence.

                  Another gush told Joe that it was not as purely evil as it seemed. It was afraid of him, of everything. It would not let the woman go because it was afraid of what would happen to itself if it released her.

                  Well, thought Joe, what would happen?

                  Silence answered. The rush of information stopped, as if Something had turned off a tap.

                  All alone now. He had to get between the thing and its prey. If he had been in his body, a wave of nausea would have shot through him. But he was not in his body. He had no cold sweat, no clenching of the muscles of his belly. No belly.

                  It was not enough just to want to help.

                  The certainty of his fix melted through him. It wasn’t the land of milk and honey yet, not by a long shot. He had figured on release, but it was not yet to be. There was something to do, even if he was dying.

                  The younger woman wept silently, her hands never pausing in their ghostly massage. He tasted her fears, felt himself inside her pain. The thing seemed to need the ointment. She was trapped, unable to stop. Then he had it: without the hateful salve, the thing would leave the old woman, jump to someone else, someone healthy and unsuspecting. The salve held it in place.

                  Where it had come from, Joe had no idea. It did not seem important. The thing itself did not know. It existed in this middle ground without memory, only knowing that it had to feed.

                  This must be how ghost stories started. Now he was in one.

                  Everything he paused to think about was a delaying tactic. He was keeping himself from the moment of choice. Hell, he was failing to close the sale.

                  He let himself drift away from the wall where he was huddling. He was invisible to the young woman, but not to the thing. It noticed his movement, alerted itself. It was as afraid as he was.

                  He moved toward the bed. Slowly. It would not be surprised.

                  Joe spread himself out, like an amoeba about to engulf its prey, around the old woman and the beast that rode her. The younger’s hands went through his insubstantial self. He could feel their movements. The thing stiffened under him, within him. It looked for something to grab onto, to snare and destroy. It was closer to matter than he was. It held nothing, was engulfed by nothing. Joe contained the old woman and the thing.

                  It struggled, shrieking soundlessly with a pain that, until this moment, Joe could never have imagined. The woman within him stiffened in a grand mal convulsion. The thing heaved inside Joe’s enclosing grasp. Joe held on, containing the thing in spite of its agony, trying to drain off the lonely pain, cuddling it against the dry rasp of the world it had known. He gentled the thing, as a mother gentled a child screaming with night terror, protecting it from its own destructiveness.

                  There was no time in Joe’s consciousness. The struggle lasted until it was over. There was no sequence to events once Joe slipped around the creature.

                  It hurt, and Joe contained its pain.

                  The hurt stopped. The thing wondered at the end of pain, noticed Joe, lashed out.

                  Joe hurt, and Joe contained the pain, refused to turn it back against its source, let the pain slip out and dissipate, not fighting, but enduring. His consciousness wondered at the ability. He had not thought of himself as a healer.

                  The hurt stopped again. The thing quit.

                  Joe separated them from the body of the old woman. The younger slipped her hands away, fell to her knees, and threw her arms around her mother, weeping again, but joyfully.

                  What to do?

                  He felt as if he had a tiger by the tail. What could happen if he let go?

                  He withdrew from the two women. He held his own salvation and his own problem inside himself.

                  The thing was a person, once. It could be again. But the healing of it was beyond him. He removed it from the place where it could easily attach itself again to its victim.

                  He needed the Something that had spoken to him before. He called.

                  It came.

                  Jesus Christ! Joe thought.

                  Its power rocked him, even in his insubstantial condition. He opened like a flower under the sun, without willing it, without even a thought of refusal. He was taken by its power, emptied of the thing he had removed from the old woman. He did not even sense it going.

                  When he regained his bearings, he was alone again, something like a ghost himself.

                  The hospital peppered him with others’ pain. He recoiled away from awareness, seeking the haven of his body, where flesh muted perception.

                  The people were still in his room. His bedclothes were in a heap in the corner. The doctors and nurses moved purposefully around him, wielding needles, medicines, tubes, machines and papers.

                  Joe tried to come back in, but seemed to bounce away. It was as if two similar electrical charges were trying to approach each other. The closer he got to himself, the greater the force pushing him away. He gathered his energies and tried to force his way back in, and found himself pushed out into the hall again.

                  The sensation—probably the wrong word, considering that he had no sense organs in his present condition—felt so hateful that he began to propel himself away, willing a greater separation from the physical body he left lying on the bed, in the hands of those people trying to make him live, even though it might mean that he would finally die dead.

                  He through he might be having his last TIA, a real stroke, this time. But he could not get back. He sought relief from the repulsive force in retreat. Matter did not matter, but he could choose not to see through the walls, not to perceive the insults to his body, to place matter between himself and the repulsive force. He ducked into Jonquil’s room.

                  If he had been in his body, he would have been panting with exertion and relief. Without the claims of his body, he was disoriented. He missed the glandular flood, the pulmonary tide, the throb of a straining heart. He was not, he discovered, quite ready to die, after all.

                  The lack of internal sensation seemed to make him hyperconscious of events around him. Jonquil’s behavior was wrong. She was out of bed, trailing wires and tubes. If the code had not been in progress, J.C. would have been in the room in seconds to find out what was going on.

                  Jonquil peeked out the window to the nurses’ station, made sure no one was watching. The nurses not involved with the code were acting busy with their own patients, while keeping an ear cocked to the activity in his room. He remembered hearing J.C. complain that they spent too much time crowding in on things that were none of their business. The code was too attractive, too dramatic a confrontation with the secret of death to be easily ignored.

                  Joe could tell them a secret or two. They might not like it as much if they knew what he knew.

                  A door opened in Joe’s perception. Jonquil was sure of solitude now, as furtive and quick in her movements as her weakened heart would allow. Her memory of the crushing pain and pressure in her chest reached Joe, and he understood her desperation. Jonquil had never known greater ugliness than that pain. It undermined her belief in what she was. She became helpless at its touch. Her self-possession flew away when the pain came, and its loss was more painful than the pain itself. It made her ugly, deep in the recesses of her self, where she thought she was eternally safe, the part of her hidden from the ones who thought they loved her. She knew that they could not maintain the fiction of affection, not even her husband, Henry, when she was disfigured by the oppressive weight of the pain.

                  If beauty’s appearance faded, what was left of beauty?

                  They had not met, although they slept only a few feet apart, tended by the same nurses. But Joe felt as if he knew the woman sneaking around her room. She was open to him in a way that, if she knew, would appall her. He had access to her memories, knew her feelings and fears. If Jonquil had her way, no one would have seen her face to face in the years since her angina had begun. She put a false face on everything about herself, because the real Jonquil, if she even existed, believed in a world where appearance was all that ever mattered.

                  Joe sought the reasons for her conviction, and found one in a family that saw only the surfaces of its members. Mother never appeared to Father with less than perfect hair and makeup. Mother got up an hour before Father to fix her face after the ravages that a pillow could wreak on her night time makeup. The children were bathed and dressed and perfumed before being allowed downstairs in the morning. The house was dusted every day by nine, in case a repairman or salesman might call. It was a compulsive house, where outward behavior was more important than inner feeling.

                  Now it would kill Jonquil before she needed to die.

                  She grunted as she lifted the corner of her mattress under pillow and scooped out her secret cache of cigarettes, morphine and Demerol. A sudden surge of pain struck her; she staggered with her lethal load, dropping the mattress heavily back onto the frame and her equipment on top of it. She breathed heavily, and her hand clutched at her chest.

                  Joe wanted to stop her. He propelled himself down from his spot near the corner where two walls and the ceiling met. He reached for Jonquil’s arm; his hand went through her. He tried again, this time aiming to sweep the collection of syringes off the bed to the floor, breaking them and making them useless. He slipped right through the drug ampoules as well.

                  Damn this spiritual body.

                  You don’t really mean that.

                  Help her! Stop her.

                  Go back. Wake up. Tell them.

                  Joe did not have to struggle for breath in his present state. He did not get dizzy from the constriction of the carotid arteries left behind in his body. His chest did not ache. He was free of the confines of his body, its corporeal limitations, its wrinkles and age-induced inadequacies. He felt good, damnit, for the first time in years. He was damned if he’d give that up.

                  Exactly.

                  Huh?

                  Look at her again.

                  Joe had no choice but to obey.

                  Jonquil lay back on the bed, breathing heavily. She picked up one of the syringes. Joe’s vision seemed to zoom in on the ampoule. Morphine sulfate carpuject.

                  The ampoules were tiny, only a few cc’s each.

                  Jonquil smiled, a bitter grimace full of determination. She leaned across to the IV pump. Laboriously, as if she had thought out the whole process, she grappled with the stand, until she had lowered the pole containing her IV fluid to a level that she could reach easily.

                  Jonquil pierced the top of the bag with the syringe and let the narcotic drip gently onto the top of the fluid and dropped the syringe. She took another and repeated the process, over and over, until her supply was gone, being careful not to mix the drug with the fluid already in the bag. It floated invisibly on top of the solution, beginning the slow diffusion that would calmly and quietly kill her.

                  Jonquil dropped the empty syringes into the trash, covered it with tissue. She leaned back, tired from the effort, still smiling her bitter smile. Combined with the anti-hypertensive drug already in her blood, soon she would sleep, forever.

                  Jonquil fished a cigarette from the pack, scratched a light from a kitchen match hidden in her bathrobe, and settled back for her last smoke. Wreathed in its fumes, she was, at last, content.

                  Joe had to back up. A little of her rubbed off on him, enough to make him understand the fear and desperation that made her demand a few quiet and painless moments before she died. But once started backing up, he continued. The doctors and nurses were still working on him; no one saw the monitors, saw Jonquil’s exertion, smelled the smoke in her room. He struggled back, toward his failing body, and found himself backtracking—across the ICU to the room of La Curandera, through the wall, down and up through the wiring and plumbing in a whirl of speed, as if he were being ejected, spewed forth from death’s warm and comfortable consolation. The now faint and nearly invisible silver cord grew taut and strong, pulling him backward, spinning him through space and time (time, too?—Well, he wasn’t in charge). He slammed back into his body and screamed in agony at the raw physicality of living.

                  A clammy black plastic covered his mouth and nose, forcing air into his lungs. Someone was trying to crush his chest, rhythmically pushing him down hard against a wooden board that had appeared under his back. He felt the sting of three large needles stuck hurriedly into his veins, not more than cursorily taped to prevent accidental movement. They ground against the walls of the blood vessels, abrading the soft tissue.

                  He waved an arm to slap away the mask. One of the needles popped out of his skin, but he did not stop. He was in a panic to warn them about Jonquil.

                  The bag flew away.

                  “Hold on!” someone shouted. “He’s awake.”

                  “Ow!” Joe’s flailing arm caught a nurse in the nose. He tried to talk, but nothing came out.

                  “Joe!” J.C. called sharply. He knew that voice. “Settle down. We’re trying to help you.”

                  “Tie his arms down—he’s crazy!”

                  Strong hands gripped his wrists and forced them against the sides of the bed. He was naked, uncovered, and shivering with cold.

                  Joe knew he was babbling at them, but it was so important to explain what was happening down the hall.

                  The message was clear in his mind, but his body refused to follow its orders. His throat hurt, his tongue felt thick and uncooperative. Out of his mouth came only nonsense sounds. He asked for water and it came out in baby talk: “Wa-wa.” But J.C. understood.

                  “Can he have a little water?” she asked Walters.

                  “I guess a taste can’t hurt him, but only enough to moisten his lips.”

                  Jeannie wet a washcloth and held it to Joe’s lips. He sucked greedily at it, until she pulled it away. “That’s enough. Take it easy, Joe. Relax.”

                  He nodded to her, not really seeing the others. They probably thought he was off his nut before this; they would be certain, now. But he had to tell someone.

                  He had never had such an important message to communicate in all his life. And they were ignoring him.

                  “Hennessy—” he managed to croak. “Jonquil—no one’s watching…Go there—”

                  “Valium, ten milligrams, IM,” Walters ordered.

                  “Wait a second,” Jeannie said. “He’s trying to say something.”

                  “That’s why I ordered the valium.”

                  Up close like this, J.C. smelled of coffee and shampoo and youth. Being alive wasn’t so bad after all. Joe forced himself to speak again. He struggled against the restraining hands.

                  “Hennessy—needs help—bad,” he managed.

                  “Sssh, Joe, come on now, lie back—you’ve had a bad time of it,” Jeannie said.

                  “Please…” he said. The tears came easily, almost without his knowing it. “I couldn’t stop her. Please look.”

                  Walters stuck the hypo into Joe’s arm himself. Joe felt the bite of the needle in his skin. The slight burn where the drug went into him made him weep even more. They were knocking him out with his task unfinished. He was no damn good to anyone like this. But the living was so sweet that he could not give it up. As he slipped into hazy semi-consciousness, he thought that he was dying.

                  “It’s all right, Joe,” someone nice said as his eyes fluttered shut and the world darkened. “I’ll go look. You rest. I’ll be back to see you, I promise.”

                  He fell asleep, weeping and dreaming of coffee, shampoo, and youth.

                 

Chapter 17

           

                  Joe’s plea was probably the nattering of a confused, sick old man, Jeannie thought. But he had been so determined to tell her that she felt she ought to look in on Jonquil. Another nurse should have covered Jeannie’s patient while she was busy. But sometimes staff discipline went to blazes during a code. There were too many vultures in this business, wanting a glimpse of the dying while it was going on.

                  “Hoss, go take a look at Jonquil, will you?” Joe was asleep now, and apparently stable again. She covered him up to retain his body heat and wiped the tears from his face.

                  “You really think something’s wrong?”

                  “Just go,” Jeannie ordered. She looked up from Joe to make sure that Hoss obeyed and saw Wanda Sue just inside the doorway. “What are you looking at? Get back to your job.”

                  “Well, you don’t have to get all huffy about it,” the ward clerk whined. “I wasn’t hurtin’ nothin’.”

                  “This is none of your business. Go on.”

                  “Hmph.” Wanda Sue sulked back to her desk. Jeannie finished wiping up Joe. Jeff Walters was watching her.

                  “You pack a mean punch when you want to,” he said.

                  “It ticks me off,” Jeannie answered. “There’s more than one patient around here.” Vivian was off at a staff meeting and had left Jeannie in charge. She did not appreciate the extra responsibility, but as long as she had it, she would handle it. The respiratory therapist was wheeling his equipment out of the room, keeping silent in the face of Jeannie’s wrath. “And I don’t like vultures.”

                  “Hey, I’m just doing my job,” the tech said.

                  “I didn’t mean you,” Jeannie apologized. “Thanks for your help.”

                  “Didn’t do much, J.C.,” the tech said. “He came back on his own.”

                  “You were here.”

                  “Yeah, well…” He paused at the door, puzzled. “They usually don’t come back talking. They don’t usually come back at all. He was out for a long time. Think he’s OK?”

                  “We’ll see when he wakes up,” Walters said. “At least he’s not a veggie. Don’t know what’s keeping him alive, though.”

                  “Hell, what keeps any of us alive?” The tech squeaked his cart-full of equipment down the hall.

                  Jeannie and Jeff Walters listened to the ungreased bearings until the corridor swallowed up the sounds.

                  “You seem different.”

                  “How so?” Jeannie was transferring her code notes to Joe’s chart, while her memory was still fresh and she knew what her notes meant.

                  “I’m not sure.” Walters pushed his hair back from here it fell in his eyes. “God, I’m soaking wet.”

                  “Me, too,” Jeannie said. The breeze from the air conditioner chilled the sweat under her blue scrubs.

                  “You do, you know. Seem different, I mean. More sure of yourself.”

                  “Maybe I’m sick,” Jeannie snapped. She was tired of the hospital, of patients, even Joe, of accusations, of doctors, of illness, of crises, of dying. She wanted to get outside of the air-conditioned madhouse and sit quietly in the warm sunshine for a month or two.

                  “You don’t have to bite my head off,” Walters complained.

                  Her memory of physiology classes told her that her fatigue and irritability  were the leftovers of the adrenaline rush of the code. The secretions of her adrenal glands used up her paltry reserves of blood sugar, leaving her, after, tired and almost weepy. She had no energy for chit-chat; she still had work to do, and she had to harbor her depleted reserves.

                  “Sorry,” she said, “I just don’t feel—”

                  Hoss came back in.

                  “She’s quiet,” he said, “but her monitor’s on the fritz and I can’t figure out what’s wrong.”

                  Jeannie checked the time—11:10. They had been with Joe for two hours during which no one had been watching Jonquil. How long had her monitors been out?

                  “Keep an eye on him,” she told the physician. It was against protocol for her to give Walters orders, but she wanted Hoss to come along to show her what was wrong. She did not want Joe unwatched just yet, although he seemed to be doing well. She took Hoss by the arm and dragged him to Jonquil’s room.

                  Jonquil was asleep, a faint smile on her lips. She was a beautiful woman when she was content. She looked healthier than she had for days. Her skin was pink, her respiration slow and even. Jeannie touched her lightly and felt a reassuring warmth. Maybe the treatment they were giving her was working, at last.

                  The problem with the monitors was a more difficult. They checked out fine with the self-diagnostic program, but nothing came up on the screen. Her first suspicion was that Jonquil had disconnected herself again, but a quick check showed the leads in place. Jeannie traced the wires back to the small computer that interpreted the electrical impulses, turned the stream of data into useful information. There was no problem that she could see, but there was nothing on the screen.

                  Her gaze shifted around the room, looking for something wrong, something out of place, but found nothing.

                  “I told you it didn’t make any sense,” Hoss said. Jeannie shushed him, trying mentally to trouble-shoot the system. The diagnostics ran OK, the baselines were in place, but no data from Jonquil appeared on the screen. She turned the unit around; sure enough, a single piece of wire dangled from the back of the monitor. It had been cut.

                  She traced it back to the computer. The cut should have triggered an auditory alarm, but sometimes the alarms were touchy, going off with no real cause, or worse, not sounding when they should. She pulled the jack from the monitor, found a tiny folding knife in her pocket, and began stripping insulation from the cut ends of the wire. It was coaxial cable, similar to what she used to connect the components of her stereo, with a central core of solid wire, surrounded by a plastic insulator, then by a braid of fine wire shielding. The outer layer was gray plastic.

                  “Who did it?” Hoss asked. Jeannie did not take time to answer. She was afraid to. She hurried the work, slicing her thumb with her knife as she worked surgical tape around the jury-rigged connection. She felt her heart rate jump as suspicion grew, felt sweat break out anew on her skin, felt a throbbing in the veins in her forehead grow nearly into pain as fresh secretions poured from her adrenal glands into her blood stream.

                  She fought the fear down, forcing her fingers to comply with her need. The connection was sloppy, the white tape spotted with her blood, but it would have to do. She plugged it into the jack at the back of the monitor.

                  As she pushed the jack home, the alarm sounded.

                  Shit.

                  It didn’t make sense. Jonquil was pink, healthy. Jeannie confirmed her first impression: Jonquil was sleeping peacefully, even through the alarm.

                  Jonquil turned blue-gray as Jeannie turned to look at her.

                  “Did you see that?”

                  “Jesus,” Jeannie breathed. “Get Walters in here.” Jonquil’s color had changed in moments, as if the supply of oxygen to her organs and skin had been suddenly cut back almost to nothing. She watched the rise and fall of Jonquil’s ribs; it had become almost imperceptible. She found her fingers touching Jonquil’s throat, searching for the carotid pulse. At first she thought it was absent, but in a moment she had it. The rate was dead slow, under forty. The skin under her fingers turned cold and clammy.

                  She shouted at her patient, trying to rouse her, shaking her roughly at the shoulder.

                  “Jonquil, wake up! Talk to me!” Jeannie called. “Jonquil! Jonquil! Wake up, damnit!?

                  She lifted Jonquil’s eyelid. The pupil was a constricted pinpoint of black. As she watched, it dilated; the circle of black grew wide.

                  Hoss reappeared in the doorway.

                  “Walters is gone.”

                  “Code Blue!” Jeannie called. She had once been in a play at the community theater; one of the things she had learned there was how to project her voice. It rang through the unit.

                  “Help me get the board under her,” Jeannie said. She found the ambu-bag in her hands, its outlet pressed to Jonquil’s face, her hands squeezing a steady pulse of air into Jonquil’s failing lungs.

                  Hoss had the backboard out of the closet and in position to slide under Jonquil. Jeannie put down the bag long enough to grab Jonquil by the hip and roll her on her side. Hoss slipped the board under her; Jeannie let her fall back on its hard surface.

                  People were beginning to show up at the door to the room, in response to Jeannie’s call for help. A respiratory tech, the same one that Jeannie had accidentally chewed out in Joe’s room, tried to push through the crowd with his cart.

                  “Comin’ through, people,” he sang out, “comin’ through.” The RT took over the ambu-bag, leaving Jeannie free to run the code.

                  She glanced at the screen showing the activity of Jonquil’s heart. The rate was still below forty.

                  “Prissy-Jo, get a pressure.” Jeannie moved to the head of the bed, where she could watched everything that happened. “Maureen, run a strip. I can’t tell what the hell she’s doing.”

                  The flickering screen showed an anomalous pattern. She needed to have something in her hand that she could study. While was waiting the few seconds it took the EKG strip to come out of the printer, she spied Wanda Sue watching from the door.

                  “Get me a doctor in here—now!” She held out her hand for the strip. Maureen ripped it from the printer and stared at it for a brief moment.

                  “Come on,” Jeannie demanded.

                  “It’s weird,” Maureen said as she handed it over.

                  Perhaps two minutes had passed since Jeannie had called the code, and she had no idea what was happening to her patient.

                  The strip was no help. The symptoms were consistent with sinus bradycardia, a heart rhythm that looked normal except that it was slow. But the strip from the EKG showed what looked an awful lot like second degree heart block. Jeannie was out of her depth and knew it. The carotid pulse was weak and slow. If Jonquil had heart block, it should have been bounding, strong and rapid. It couldn’t be ordinary bradycardia or heart block. It was something else, something she did not recognize.

                  Time slowed down, the way it does just before impact in an auto accident.

                  “Pressure’s hard to read,” Prissy-Jo said. “I think it’s about sixty, systolic.”

                  Jeannie felt all the eyes in the room on her, waiting for her decision. Where was a damn doctor? Any damn doctor would do.

                  Her decision could not wait. She felt Jonquil’s carotid pulse again, again looked at the strip of paper in her hand. The pulse faltered under her fingertips. She closed her eyes, trying to extend her understanding of what was wrong with Jonquil through her fingers. The pulse faltered again. Jonquil stopped breathing for a few seconds, then seemed to gasp for air in a series of deep and rapid respirations.

                  “She’s going into CSR,” the RT warned. Cheyne-Stokes respiration could be a sign of either heart failure or central nervous system damage. Or it might mean nothing at all; some people slept with CSR all their lives.

                  Jeannie was scared. She had to decide; everyone was watching her. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she could not stand still and let her patient die. She made the only decision she could. At least it couldn’t hurt Jonquil. She had to get her pressure up.

                  “Atropine, one milligram,” she ordered, breaking through her paralysis. Better to do something. Maureen was ready with the needle and injected the drug into Jonquil’s IV line.

                  The pulse under Jeannie’s fingers stopped.

                  “Start compressions,” she ordered Hoss.

                  Where was the goddamned doctor?

                  Jeannie had to fight panic in herself. She was in charge; the others would follow her lead. If she behaved badly, the others would, too. She breathed deeply a few times, listening to the hiss of the ambu-bag, the rustling of Jonquil’s sheets, the soft grunts from Hoss as he counted the rate of compressions he was administering to Jonquil. The internal surge of adrenaline faded into the background of heartbeat and breath. She was back in control.

                  Why Jonquil was dying did not matter. The task was to respond to the observed symptoms. Very low blood pressure and very slow—now absent—pulse meant bradycardia. Why Jonquil was suffering them was irrelevant.

                  Algorithms marched through Jeannie’s head. The treatment sequences had been tried, tested, and revised, approved by the American Heart Association after years of research. They were comforting, because they assured that, if she followed them, she would do everything that could be done to save Jonquil’s life. They took the error factor out of the treatment loop.

                  The proper algorithm seemed to dance in front of her eyes, its branching paths shining before her. She had already begun to follow it, with the initial dose of atropine.

                  The algorithm was a way of thinking, step by step, through mortal crisis. If such-and-such happened, do this. Watch and see what happened next. The following action depended on the response to the first, and so on until the patient either recovered or died.

                  Atropine came from belladonna, deadly nightshade. It was a poison. In small doses, it slowed the heart rate, but in larger amounts, as Jonquil received, it made the heart beat faster, or was supposed to. Jonquil would not notice the side effects.

                  Jeannie kept her hand on the pulse point in Jonquil’s neck. The pulse of CPR was weak and hard to feel. If Jonquil’s heart took over, Jeannie would know immediately. As yet, the only blood flowing through the woman on the bed was the blood Hoss pushed through her.

                  Jeff Walters came into the room.

                  “What’ve you got?” he asked.

                  Jeannie explained the situation, brought him up to date, relieved to give up the primary responsibility. She had controlled her panicky reaction, but it was still inside, waiting for her to relax.

                  “How long since the first dose of atropine?” Walters asked.

                  Jeannie checked her watch. She had automatically begun timing the events when the alarms went off.

                  “Four minutes.”

                  “Half a milligram of atropine, IV push,” Walters ordered. Maureen again injected Jonquil’s intravenous line. Everyone waited while Prissy-Jo pumped up the pressure cuff.

                  “Nothing yet.”

                  “Isoproterenol,” Walters ordered. Maureen was ready with the infusion. “Ten micrograms per minute.”

                  Isoproterenol might stimulate Jonquil’s heart’s electrical activity, forcing it to conduct the charges that were supposed to flow through the heart to pace its contractions. The danger of the drug was that it might stimulate the heart too much, and send it into uncontrolled activity, but it was a risk worth taking. The alternative was death.

                  Jeannie still held her hand on Jonquil’s neck. As the new drug entered her system, she thought she felt a flutter under her fingers. It lasted only a second. Then it returned, dancing at the edge of her sensitivity, a rhythm different from Hoss’s steady pumping, the touch of a feather against sleeping skin, but undeniably present.

                  “I’ve got something,” she said. “Unsteady, but there’s something going on.”

                  “Stop CPR,” Walters said. Hoss lifted his hands from Jonquil; he was breathing heavily with the effort of pushing her blood, but he stayed poised to resume.

                  Jeannie tried again to stretch her perception underneath Jonquil’s skin. Where was the flutter? Something trembled underneath as she struggled to keep her touch light on Jonquil’s carotid.

                  “There it is!” she whispered, afraid to make too much sound that might chase away the elusive pulse. It disappeared anyway. She shifted her position slightly to change the angle at which her fingertips touched Jonquil’s throat.

                  Her foot touched down on something round and went out from under her. Her hand came away from Jonquil and reflexively grabbed the head of the bed.

                  “Come on, Christopher!” Walters chided her. Jeannie steadied herself and again touched Jonquil’s throat. The flutter was absent. “Nothing,” she said.

                  “Resume CPR,” Walters said.

                  Hoss was ready and resumed the same steady, punishing rhythm.

                  “Atropine again, half a milligram.”

                  Maureen pushed the drug through the IV line.

                  Jeannie felt nothing but cold clammy skin under her fingers. Jonquil felt dead. She glanced down to see what she had slipped on.

                  It was a syringe.

                  She bent to pick it up.

                  Walters growled at her, but she ignored him.

                  Reality seemed to shrink to the disposable hypodermic on the floor. Time stretched away from her. She watched her hand reach through space as it traveled out in front of her, as if she would never quite reach the syringe.

                  Then, suddenly, it was as if her arm was a rubber band pulled taut and quickly released. The syringe was in her hand, empty, the plunger pressed all the way against the stop.

                  She read the label, knowing what she would see. Joe had told her. The world was rearranging itself, snapping back into place in a new pattern.

                  She stood up.

                  Walters was staring at her.

                  She held out the syringe to him, letting it lie in her open palm.

                  He took it.

                  “Morphine sulfate, fifteen milligrams,” he read on the syringe. “Where did you get this?”

                  Jeannie did not answer. She swept around the end of the bed, to the corner of the room where she found the trash can. She dumped it on the floor. Seven more empty syringes clattered on the tile.

                  Morphine and Demerol—eight doses of the narcotics.

                  “Nalaxone,” Walters ordered. “Point-four milligrams.”

                  There was none in the room. Jonquil was not being treated with narcotics. There had been no need for the narcotic antagonist.

                  Jeannie could not go; she was running the code.

                  “Prissy-Jo.” Jeannie returned to her position at the head of the bed. The nurse left her station at the bedside and rushed off to the medication room to get the drug.

                  Prissy-Jo returned, bearing a half-dozen 0.4 mg ampules of naloxone. She dumped them on the bed. Maureen took one and injected it. The RT kept breathing Jonquil. Hoss kept pumping blood through her, moving the narcotic antagonist toward her brain, where, they hoped, it would replace the morphine and Demerol molecules that were depressing her respiration.

                  After two minutes with no effect, they repeated the dose. Two minutes more, a third injection. Two minutes after the fourth try with no results, Jeff Walters sighed and stepped back from the bed.

                  “Cover her up.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. “It’s over.”

                  The respiratory technician gave Jonquil one last breath. Hoss stopped CPR, his winded breathing the only sound now in the room. Maureen pulled the bed sheet over Jonquil, restoring to the body the privacy it had not been allowed while they had worked her over.

                  Walters spoke, explaining his choice.

                  “We could intubate her and put her on a ventilator,” he said, “but her heart has given up. Even if we did get her jump-started, after all this time she’d be a vegetable. We’ll let her go.”

                  No one disagreed with him. Death on the vent was a long time coming, and the law said that once a patient was on the ventilator, removal of life-support from a patient incapable of living without it was homicide.

                  Hoss and Prissy-Jo returned to their patients. Maureen offered to help Jeannie clean up and make the body presentable for Henry to see, but Jeannie turned her down. She wanted to handle this one by herself.

                  With everyone out of the room, Jeannie shut the door. The body was a mess; the room was strewn with the debris of the code—paper wrappers, discarded syringes, blood, urine, feces—and the evidence of Jonquil’s suicide, the eight empty syringes.

                  “Pretty bad, huh?”

                  Jeannie jumped in fright and whirled to see Vivian standing in the doorway.

                  “You scared me!”

                  “Sorry, J.C. Didn’t mean to. You doing all right?”

                  “I’ll be fine.”

                  “I heard what happened, what you found.”

                  “It’s a hell of a way to be proved innocent,” Jeannie said. “If I had just—”

                  “If you had just what?” Vivian asked. “Watched her every minute of every day?”

                  “Closer than I did,” Jeannie said. She felt the pain only in her voice. Inside, she was as calm as thin ice.

                  With one accord the two women began cleaning up the third. They removed the top sheet and washed Jonquil down from head to toe. They removed the IV line, and, as well as they could, cleansed the abrasions left on her face by the RT during the code. They changed the bed linens, making neat hospital corners, and remembered to tug on the sheet under Jonquil, so as to avoid leave wrinkles that would cause bedsores on the skin of a living person. They picked up the trash, saving out the empty syringes of Demerol and morphine, which would be kept as evidence of the cause of death and put them into a clean biohazard bag for safekeeping.

                  They were on the point of leaving the room when Jeannie turned back.

                  She went to the window and opened it, to let in J.C. and the boys.

                 

Chapter 18

                 

                  The dark green-painted wood of the park bench had absorbed the heat of the sun throughout the day. But J.C. was still cold. She sat wrapped in the thin cloth of her lab jacket, numb with cold under the west Texas sun.

                  “Tell me,” Father Diego had said. “Tell me about it. You can’t keep it locked inside forever.”

                  It was easier done than said.

                  The tiny park lay across the highway from the hospital. The brick building squatted four stories tall beyond the stream of speeding cars.

                  Vivian did not let her leave the unit, not until her shift was over. Then the head nurse must have called Father Diego, because the priest found her before she could get off the hospital grounds.

                  “Get out of my way,” Jeannie had shouted at him, trapped by the cleric’s body, which stood immobile in front of her car, letting her nudge him with its front bumper. Another car was parked behind her; her only way out was through the priest, and he would not budge.

                  Trapped, she had broken down, sitting in the broiling heat of her car, sweat mingling with tears.

                  Diego waited. When Jeannie’s resolve collapsed, he opened the door and drew her out of the driver’s seat. He steered her through the traffic, across the four-lane highway to the park bench. He cooed and clucked about her like a mother hen.

                  He had infuriated her, until she saw what he was doing. Then she had dropped into numbness like a pebble into a pool of water. He could say what he wanted. It did not matter. Nothing mattered, except that her own actions had led to the death of Jonquil Marie Hennessy.

                  Jeannie probed the guilt as if it were the empty socket of a tooth. She wanted the pain to flood her. She went over every thing she had done at work for the past three days, since the morning she had arrived at work and left the narcotics locker open and given Jonquil the opportunity to steal the medicines that she used to kill herself.

                  The whole hospital was in an uproar. No one blamed Jeannie, exactly, but she could not escape her own failure to keep track of what was going on around her. If she had not been late that morning; if she had just re-locked the cabinet right away; if she had realized that Jonquil had been hoarding her medication—if, if, if!

                  She was aware of Diego’s presence beside her on the bench. She wanted to be by herself, wanted to be as alone as she felt, but he refused to leave her. She had always been the comforter, even for herself—especially!—and now he would not leave her to herself, to heal, or at least to scab over the wound, in the only way she knew how.

                  She should have known. No matter how she rationalized, how much she worried the situation, she always came back to the single fact that she was responsible for Jonquil, on the first day and the third day, and should have seen the signs. But she had been so wrapped up in her own problems that she had had no energy to spare to understand what was going on in the mind of her patient. She could not excuse herself—her job was to save life, not to let others end it.

                  Diego was waiting. He would wait until the Devil learned to ice skate if necessary, but he would, she knew, wait her out.

                  Something moved her hand into his. His big paw wrapped around her tiny hand, cradling it, still waiting.

                  Jeannie had come into nursing through the traditional route. Her mother had been a nurse, and the tradition of caring had been passed from one generation to another. Even her sister was a nurse. It was a career where there would always be work.

                  Nursing was like mothering. A person lay sick or hurt in bed. She needed help to get well, hour-by-hour, often moment-by-moment. The physician stopped by the bed once, perhaps twice, a day. But the nurse was there through the day or night, doing the things that the patient, the child, could not do for herself—handling the medicines, changing the linens, cleaning the bedpan, tracking the patient’s progress, counseling her family, easing her loneliness, giving her a bath, bringing her meals, relieving pain, watching out for complications, teaching her how to cope with the illness. There was no end to the list of duties.

                  The physician’s responsibility for the patient was acute; the nurse’s was chronic.

                  Blood and shit were the nurse’s lot—not, usually, the blood of surgery, but that of the aftermath, the detritus of daily care.

                  How had she missed Jonquil’s preparations for suicide?

                  Death was common on her unit. It came often as a blessing, a release from pain and degradation. It was not supposed to come on purpose.

                  Jonquil had not been so sick that the coming of death should have been welcomed. She had had angina, but had not been in imminent danger of death. She could have lived for years, with only occasional episodes.

                  She must have been terribly afraid, and Jeannie had not seen it as different from a patient’s normal fears. She had not taken the time to understand Jonquil. She had treated her as the angina in Eleven, not as the person who was mortally afraid of pain and disfigurement.

                  When Jeannie was in nursing school, she had seen older nurses, more experienced than she, who were callous toward their patients and treated them as inconveniences. She had vowed never to allow herself to fall into that trap. But Jonquil, and the pressures of the needs of the other patients, had tricked her out of her resolve. Or maybe she had forgotten it, and become like the nurses she had despised.

                  Maybe it was time to quit.

                  Maybe Jonquil’s legacy to the world should be the resignation of a nurse who had been at it too long, who had lost the capacity for caring about the patients who were difficult.

                  Jonquil was not the first at whom Jeannie had been angry. She found herself, not always, but disturbingly often, thinking How dare you have chest pain during my shift—I already have too much to do!

                  Toward Jonquil that thought had varied: How dare you be afraid of something as small and easily controlled as angina. There are people here who are far sicker than you.

                  Fear would kill, too, if you did not ease it. Fear had killed Jonquil.

                  And her nurse had allowed it to happen. Perhaps, if Jeannie had been more perceptive, she would have tied Jonquil’s wandering to the missing narcotics. Perhaps, if Jeannie had been more perceptive, not so tied up in her own problems, she might have thought through Jonquil’s behavior and been on the alert for a suicide attempt.

                  But Jeannie had been too busy.

                  She recoiled as something touched her face. She opened her eyes, to see Father Diego holding a handkerchief in front of her, a look of dismay on his face.

                  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. You were crying.”

                  He had been wiping tears from her face. Her hand touched her cheek; it was still wet.

                  “I am?”

                  Diego nodded.

                  Jeannie would not meet his eyes. She watched a young couple, at the far end of the park. They were sitting on another bench, holding each other, not talking. There was a tightness about the set of the young man’s jaw that she recognized. Someone they loved was dying. She had seen the look in her own unit too many times to miss recognizing it now.

                  This park was where the families came when the chapel was too small to contain their imminent grief. She had seen the people from the windows of ICU, seen the familiar faces of the family members singly or in pairs, using the open sky, the trees and grass, the green wooden benches, as repositories of loneliness.

                  She had not envisioned herself as one of them.

                  She found her tears again. She turned to Diego, buried her face in his shoulder, and wept, for herself, for Jonquil, for the fearful couple across the park.

                  She felt the father’s arms around her, absorbing her shaking and her tears. It made her angry with herself for her weakness, with him for his strength, and she tried to break away. But Diego held her. She pounded  her fists against his chest, and he absorbed that, too.

                  A child in her father’s arms, she reached the peak of her fury, then slowly, slowly descended. The sobs grew less racking, finally subsiding into wet sniffles. The arms still held her, but now they were comforting. She felt the priest’s hand stroking her hair, heard his voice murmuring words she had not need to understand. The sounds were enough, the sounds that parents murmured from the beginning of time. She giggled suddenly, and his enfolding arms loosened.

                  “Are you all right?”

                  She nodded, still sniffling and giggling, still on the edge of more tears. She took a deep breath, looking for equilibrium. The inrush of oxygen helped. She felt the tears begin to dry as she got her emotional feet back under her.

                  Diego held out his handkerchief. She took it, wiped away the remaining moisture, and blew her nose. She started to hand it back to him, then realized what it contained.

                  “Keep it,” he said, grinning. “In my line of work, you carry half a dozen handkerchiefs. It’s a budget item; the diocese pays.”

                  “I’m sorry,” Jeannie said.

                  “Don’t apologize,” Diego replied. “You wouldn’t be human if it didn’t get to you.”

                  “That’s too easy, damn it!” Jeannie said, rising from the bench. She took a few steps away from him. She would not face him; she knew what his face would look like—a mask of compassion, real enough, but practiced, and it infuriated her. She used the same mask herself.

                  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “That was unfair. But it is too easy. I’m supposed to be able to handle it.”

                  She knew where her anger was coming from, but it was easier, safer, to direct it at the priest than toward herself.

                  The soft breeze was drying her tears.

                  Suddenly, the priest’s hands were on her shoulders, roughly turning her around. She could not help but face an anger that fed off her own.

                  “Don’t give me that!” Diego commanded. His voice was rough with passionate anger. His hands dug into her shoulders. They were stronger than Jeannie would have expected in a man whose work was mainly sedentary. They were hurting her.

                  “You can’t be perfect.” Diego’s voice was soft, but the words hissed across the small intervening space. “Sometimes you fail. If you were always right, you’d be a machine. Or a god.”

                  His hands released her, almost flinging her away from him. Jeannie stumbled slightly, then caught herself.

                  “Oh, you’re good,” Diego went on, panting with exertion. “You’re as good as they come, but you’ll kill yourself one of these days. Maybe it’ll be an ulcer, maybe a heart attack, maybe it’ll just be despair, and you’ll find yourself not caring any more, complaining all the time, cursing your patients for their pain, and you’ll quit. You’ll give up because you can’t handle the fact the God has arranged things in a way that doesn’t suit your image of yourself.

                  “There’s death in this world, child, and you can’t stop it single-handedly. There’s pain and grief. You can’t change it. There’s stupidity and greed. People aren’t going to be the way you think they should be. The world is imperfect, and so are the people in it—even you!”

                  “I know that!”

                  “No, you don’t,” Diego said. His face was red with anger, his breath shallow and rapid. “You have been unjustly accused, you have been overworked, you have been used and abused, and you allow nothing for yourself.”

                  “What—?”

                  “Shut up and listen,” Diego said. His hand reached toward the bench and he lowered himself gingerly on to it. “Sit down with me,” he said. “Please.”

                  Jeannie obeyed, her body stiff with humiliation.

                  “I’ve been in this business a long time,” Diego said. “I’ve learned a thing or two. Bear with me; it’s important.

                  “You do an awful lot of good. But no one is right all the time. No one can be. That is reserved to God, and sometimes, I confess, I wonder about Him.

                  “Forgive yourself for Jonquil. She made you angry. She tricked you. She tricked everyone—the doctors, the other nurses, me, her husband—everyone. That’s what she was trying to do, for reasons we’ll never know, and she succeeded.”

                  “But she was in my care! I was responsible.”

                  “If you were perfect, how long would she have lived?”

                  “If she took care of herself, for years”

                  “Did she take care of herself?”

                  Jeannie hesitated, then admitted it. “No.”

                  “So you couldn’t keep her from dying.”

                  Jeannie shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

                  “Forgive yourself, then, J.C.,” Diego said, “for something you had no power to prevent.”

                  Jeannie shivered, trying to deny the thought that found words even as she tried to push it away. It welled up inside her and would not be denied.

                  “They all die,” she whispered. “They all hurt so bad, and then they die. And I can’t stop them.”

                  “You can only love them,” Diego said softly.

                  “There’s so much pain,” Jeannie said.

                  “But not forever.” He held her hand in his. She accepted it like a life line.

                  “It feels like forever,” she said.

                  “It’s not,” Diego answered. “Everything ends, even the pain.”

                  “Promise?”

                  “I promise,” Diego said. His voice seemed to catch in his throat. His hand escaped her grip and flew to his chest. His face turned ashen. His mouth opened as he seemed to gulp at the air.

                  Jeannie grabbed him at the shoulders as he teetered, thrown off balance by the pain in his chest, but she could not hold him against its power. Diego fell to the grass, arching his back in agony, pulling Jeannie down with him.

                  His face relaxed as the pain eased for a moment. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he said weakly, smiling up into her face.

                  “No,” she whispered, “not you, too.”

                  “Tell her,” Diego said before the pain took him again. “Tell her that I remember, and loved—love her.”

                  “Who?” Jeannie asked, looking across the busy street to the hospital where, if she could get him there, help would be waiting.

                  “Elena,” he whispered. The agony returned, crossing his face as she watched him. Her training took over; she blocked out the questions.

                  She fumbled with his collar, not knowing how to release the sign of his vocation. There had to be a button, or something. While she worried it off, she looked for the young couple, and found them walking away, arms around each other.

                  “Help me!” she shouted. They stopped, looking for the source of sound amid the traffic noises. “Over here,” she yelled, “help!”

                  The woman saw her and pointed. Both came running.

                  With Diego’s collar now free, Jeannie felt for his pulse and assessed his breathing. No air was getting through. She slipped her left hand under his neck and lifted, forcing his head to tilt back. While waiting a moment to see whether he would breathe spontaneously, she put the fingertips of her right hand lightly against the groove in his throat by the side of his larynx. He was pulseless.

                  She knelt down further, touching her hand to his chest, placing her ear directly in front of his open mouth.

                  He was breathless.

                  Jeannie pinched his nostrils shut and covered his mouth with hers. She blew four rapid breaths into him.

                  Something that the public doesn’t know about CPR is that the patient, if enough life is left in him, may vomit into the rescuer’s mouth. Diego followed the usual pattern, perhaps because Jeannie’s breaths went partially into his stomach and stirred up its half-digested contents. It was more of a belch than anything else. Jeannie spat out the stomach matter, swabbed out Diego’s mouth with her free hand so that he would be able to breathe if she could make him, and began CPR.

                  By this time the unhappy couple had arrived. While locating the right place on Diego’s breast bone, she asked them, “Do you know CPR?”

                  “Uh-uh,” the man said. “How can we help?”

                  Jeannie’s answer was punctuated by the rapid rhythm of chest compressions.

                  “Across the street, Emergency. Tell them—Father Diego—heart attack. Send help.”

                  The combined effort of talking and pushing on Diego’s chest made her dizzy. She bent over his face, lifted his neck again, pinched his nose, and pushed two breaths into his lungs. She felt his chest expand, and she knew the breath had gotten into him.

                  When she looked up, the couple was still standing there.

                  “Go!” she ordered, and without waiting to see if they obeyed, she again positioned her hands, one atop the other, palms down, fingers interlaced, on Diego’s breast bone, just above its lower end. Her arms were stiff, elbows locked.

                  It took all her strength and weight to compress his chest. She forced herself to count the breaths out loud, to keep track of the rhythm. The technical and physical demands of the task almost kept her from thinking about what was happening to her friend. She had to stop every so often to force air into his lungs, or else the blood would move through him without effect. She had to keep the oxygen moving into the cells of his heart and brain.

                  The efficiency of CPR in transporting oxygen is only a fraction of that of a working heart, maybe thirty percent of what Diego could have done on his own. The external action had to pump the blood not only through his arteries, but into the arterioles and capillaries, each vessel smaller and narrower than the one before it, until the red cells were moving through vessels only wide enough for two or three corpuscles at a time to pass. It was in these tiny, secret places where the life-giving gas, hitchhiking on a molecule of hemoglobin, would trade places with the poisons that each cell in the body produced as a by product of living. CPR was a poor substitute for working lungs and heart, but it was all Diego had.

                  Where the hell was the ER team?

                  She felt the crack as a rib snapped under her hand, below Diego’s skin. If he woke up, he would be sore. No, when he woke up, she insisted to herself. Maybe they would joke about it later on.

                  Sweat dripped from her brow and her eyes onto her hands, which were white with tension. The drops were lenses in the late afternoon sunshine, glinting with light, sparkling against the paleness of her skin. The stubbly dry grass  jabbed her knees and ankles through the thin fabric of her scrubs, and she itched all over.

                  Over and over she repeated the rhythm, her world constricted to the vision of her hands clenched, fingers locked, the rasp of her voice counting, always counting, the sudden change of body position as she bent to tilt his head and push air into him, again and again, until suddenly there was someone kneeling across Diego from her, someone in a wine-colored scrub suit, another face, an ally.

                  He picked up the rhythm she had established, talking to her in synchronization with her rasping count. “Give-him-the-air-on-fif-teen,” he said. “I’ll-take-his-chest.”

                  He counted with her, to be certain. “Twelve-and-thir-teen, four-teen, fif-teen!”

                  Jeannie knelt to perform the ritual of breath. She slipped in two strong breaths, then stronger hands pulled her away from Diego and sat her down on the green grass. She rolled to her back, panting from exertion, again aware of the prickle of the dry grass through the thin cloth of her uniform, flooding her lungs with the hot, dry Texas-afternoon air.

                  The ER people worked on Diego. She heard them in the foreground of the normal sounds of the road and the breeze, pumping his chest, squeezing the black rubber bag, talking quickly but calmly with each other, digging in their boxes for drugs, turning on the defibrillator, making it hum, then suddenly discharge.

                  “We have a conversion,” one of them said, and Jeannie smiled at the certain congruity of it all.

                  An ambulance bounced across the grass, grinding along in low gear. Doors opened, confident, action-oriented young EMT’s jumped out, pulled a gurney out of the back of the vehicle, wheeled it to Diego’s side, lifted him with practiced movements onto its surface, strapped him on, wheeled priest and stretcher into the back of the ambulance, low-geared off the grass and across the street. Jeannie found herself in the ambulance, in the next-of-kin corner, out of the way but close to the victim, close enough to hear his labored breathing, far enough that she could not interfere with the work of the technicians.

                  It was only a short ride, but Jeannie felt helpless through it. As they moved Diego into the Emergency Room, she walked alongside his stretcher, like a wife accompanying her wounded husband.

                  They would not let her into the treatment room with him. She waited, under the talking television in the lounge with the other loved ones, while the ER staff worked on Diego. She tried to lose herself in the crises of world politics on the news station, but felt relieved when one of the other loved ones asked to switch over to a game show.

                  “Miss?” the voice came. She did not look up.

                  “Do you mind if I change the TV?”

                  Jeannie shook her head, not trusting herself to speak, to open herself to anything but the numbness she felt at Diego’s plight. It was as if he was abandoning her, leaving her behind when she needed someone who understood, as if, understanding, he were to be removed, into a place where he would test new mysteries, leaving her still in a world she did not comprehend.

                  Her questioner was Henry Halliburton Hennessy, Jonquil’s husband. Jonquil’s widower.

                  How hard it was to wait, while others worked.

                  “I’m sorry about Mrs. Hennessy,” she forced herself to say. She hoped that Henry would leave her alone. “No one saw it coming.”

                  “May I sit down?”

                  Jeannie did not respond, or perhaps she nodded dumbly. Henry sat by her.

                  “I was going to go home,” he said. He looked like a little lost boy. His voice was flat. “Home, as always. Maybe I still will. She was always afraid, you know.” The non sequitur came casually, without effort. Jeannie barely noticed the conversational leap. “Afraid of everything. I should have seen it coming, I guess, but I didn’t. The doctors told her what was coming, but she wouldn’t change anything. Her heart was never any good. She was a hard-hearted woman. Should have been named for something else than a flower. Maybe she’ll be happier now. She never was, you know. There was always something wrong with everything. Impossible to please. She never laughed the way you’re supposed to, the way that makes you forget whatever might be wrong with your life, at least for a moment, just a goddamn moment of sheer, forgetful pleasure. She never had that. She could never let go of herself.

                  “God help me, though, I loved her, even when she was at her bitchiest. Everyone talked about her, and sympathized with me. I got more sympathy about Jonquil than I knew what to do with. I hated it, but I understood it, too. She was hard to live with, hard to love. She was so damned fragile, it was like living with someone made of glass. She could cut me just by looking at me.

                  “Always afraid. That’s what it was. She was afraid when I met her, back in high school, she was afraid all the way through her life, and she was afraid when she killed herself. She pushed at me, trying to make me mad enough to hit her sometimes. Kind of to get it over with, you know? That’s why I think she killed herself—there was no avoiding the dying, it was the waiting that she couldn’t handle. She couldn’t stop herself being afraid except by going through with it. I mean, look at how she did it. She never could have stuck a needle in her skin, but through that tube it was OK. That wouldn’t hurt. It must have been as if she were doing it to someone else, almost. And the drugs she used didn’t make her die right away. She went to sleep. So maybe she didn’t face it after all. Maybe she found a safe way out.”

                  During all of his monologue, Henry had not looked at Jeannie or touched her. They merely sat, side by side, each staring at the floor.

                  Suddenly, he stood and stuck out his hand.

                  “Thank you,” he said.

                  “For what?” Jeannie asked dully.

                  “For not doing with her what I did,” Henry said. His hand was still between them, insistent, demanding.

                  “I don’t understand.”

                  “You tried to make her be a person,” he said. “For the past thirty years, I tried and couldn’t do it. You couldn’t either, but you’re the about the only one who made the effort. You didn’t let her get away with being the spoiled brat that she usually was. You stood up to her, and it helped.”

                  “Not enough.”

                  “Maybe it was just too late,” Henry said. “I don’t know. But at least you gave her that much respect. She didn’t get that from most people. So, thanks.”

                  He bent, took her hand from her lap, and clasped it in his own. There were guilty tears in his eyes as he smiled down at her. He, let her go and went hurriedly through the door and out into the world, to disappear.

                  Jeannie stood up for his exit from her life, respect for what he had tried to be welling up in her from some unknown source.

                  A voice called her name.

                        She turned.

J.C. and the Boys by Alan David Justice is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

If you'd like to have a dead tree edition of J.C. and the Boys, you'll find it here.

There's another story, The Communion of the Saint, here. 

And also here. 

And as a free audiobook here.

A Hanging Offense begins here. It's the story of the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, set in the town of Saint Albans.